The recipe is rather common these days. An artistic director — here Jan Vandenhouwe of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, a wish list that includes Prokofiev`s Romeo and Juliet, an orchestra — conducted by a leading ballet specialist, here Gavin Sutherland, a corps de ballet to set, or keep, in motion, and a ballet star called upon to activate, or re-activate, the movement machine — here Marcos Morau, founder of La Veronal and artist in residence at Nederlands Dans Theater and Zürich Ballet, as well as already a “creator for“ the Staatsballett Berlin. Add the masters of their respective liminal fields — set design, dramaturgy, lighting and costumes — here respectively Max Glaenzel, Roberto Fratini Serafide together with Koen Bollen, Silvia Bernat Jansà and Silvia Delagneau, and there it is: the monumental production of Romeo + Julia.
Like all algorithms, however, the glitch lies in wait; from the “psycho-architectural“ — where the balcony of the otherwise impressive Concertgebouw Brugge complex proves not to be vertigo-proof, (and I am indeed speaking from experience here!), to the “symbolic-partitural“ — where orchestra and corps de ballet prove not to be monumentality-proof. After a spectacular entrance procession over an electronic vibrato, made of figures in black and gray costumes, an armoured horse, a tension toward the white stained-glass of a church or cathedral (somewhere halfway between a haute couture runway and a painterly backdrop of some Flemish primitive), Prokofiev`s arrival from the orchestra pit produces a fracture that seems not structural, but accidental. Bodies and notes appear to enter, not of their own will, into two dystonic dimensions. Performers, — for they are neither dancers nor actors, and instrumentalists, unseen and unheard to each other, end up not telling the same story.
The sole, extraordinary exception (which perhaps confirms the accidental nature of an evening not quite in tune?), a very brief organic moment — over one of the many “dances of the knights“, when what-could-have-been gives itself to be glimpsed beyond what-actually-was, at the algorithmic heart of the perfect performative formula. Which, on the other hand, suggests that perhaps — “a-syntonic“ incident aside, each ingredient-element of the recipe-formula simply does not lodge within the other. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the production finds it almost called for, to rush to the aid of the readers of this “un-score“ — much as the front-of-house staff rushed to assist me with my vertigo attack! — with a glossary of Morau`s applied symbolism.
The concept of the star-choreographer remains, however, deeply compelling: two children enter and exit the circular stage, real as well as metaphorical figures attempting to play; in the boundless circle, Evil seems to dwell, embodied by a quasi-diabolical director of the dis-order. Their visible protector is a guardian angel of almost certainly superior rank, a sword-bearing warrior who seems to recall Hamlet; he defends them from this carnival of chaos which, in Morau`s stylistic choices, distils the most important tragic element of the Shakespearean original: the ferocious hatred between the two families. A resentment that is here far more than a series of street-corner bagatelles in Verona: it is a procession of global, metaphorical, almost “Heiner-Müllerian“ discontent. A `Romeo-Machine` lamenting a world stripped of all compassion, which humanity is “processionally“ bequeathing to its young.
This is where the glossary becomes indispensable: the circle as a sign of the circus, as in the arena of a bestial paralysis; the horse as the totemic herald of a bellicose-belligerent anthropology; the ritual fire inside one of the rare scenes not in black and white but in black and yellow, symbolising something as uncontrollable as love — which is, however, no longer a trope in this “non-plot“, replaced by couplings devoid of all sensuality; the candles, as if anticipating the mourning to come; the tournament, or the giostra — simulating war games in a second chromatic moment, in black and red this time, and the final mud of the funerals — harrowing — which open the stage floor like clods of earth ready to receive back the two young lovers.
Equally necessary seem to be the uncomfortable, almost irritating contortions Morau imposes on his performers, each one for each, with no assigned parts (no one is Romeo and no one is Juliet, but all are Romeo and Juliet). That gesture of the head tilted to the left, the laughter following the cortège`s progress, sliding gradually from jovial to mad. The costumes fill these distortions well, and define darkness as the new black of a “tourist-cultural“, but above all, fashionable — aesthetics. Up to a point when the eye seems, at a given moment, to see tall white collars even where there are none.
So yes, the children are watching us, I bambini ci guardano — as per De Sica`s citation present in the programme, and we are watching the children. Defended into madness, yet safe.
Or, in a closing Shakespearean cast:
All the world is chaos
And all the boys and girls are merely — hopeless, spectators
© Danny Willem
Shakespearean Tales 